The Last Day

I enjoyed this. However, I can't recall seeing a disaster movie with so much drama. You have to expect some drama so that you become invested in the characters but it seemed like a bit much for me. It wasn't a bad film though. If you are looking for something suspenseful this is probably not the right movie. If you want a drama film that just happens to, eventually, have a tsunami in it this is what you are looking for.

Disaster movies have been fine-tuned by Hollywood into a fairly reliable and polished formula. One of the ingredient is usually a good dose of melodrama. Now, Asian cinema as well, is known to spice movies with melodramatic bits.

It therefore doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what an Asian take on disaster movies is gonna end up looking like: A melodramatic extravaganza.

The first hour of Haeundae (also known as Tidal Wave in English) consists of setting up the table by presenting the cookie-cutter characters (played by a rather weak cast which tends to overact) and their clichés relationships. The script and story is pretty standard for the genre (you've seen all of this in Twister, Armageddon, many of Emmerich's movies and so on) but the writing is just... immature. As if the script came straight from a high school play. I must still praise some of the comedy bits, which are indeed funny and make certain characters more likable. Unfortunately, the dramatic bits are as (unintentionally) funny as the comedic ones and that is a problem.

The final part of the film is where the disaster unleashes and ends up being a poor payoff. The special effects, cinematography, editing are uninspired. This film suffers from poor direction and you immediately feel like you'd rather catch an old disaster flick on cable TV. But what absolutely kills the disaster scenes are the tear-jerking attempts. It's like the director is trying to squeeze a dehydrated fruit and fill a glass with orange juice.

It still deserves a 3 because there is some heart to it and it maintains your interest with some of the quirky characters. Plus a few comedic bits are also worth it. But if you're not a fan of the genre, expect a big waste of time.

I have seen quite a few Asian films from many different countries in Asia and this one was by far the worst one I have ever seen. Seriously marred by bad acting over 75 percent of the time, the concept of a Tsunami movie was buried beneath ten feet of choppy unrelated inconsequential events. I was not sure if it really was about a Tsunami until near the end-it seemed to be mostly about nothing but a raving alcoholic imbecile with a little boy. I would not recommend this film to anyone.Compared to The Host, a recent Korean horror-Sf film, Heaundea, comes off like a terrible commercial for international travel, as in, this is one vacation you would not want to take.

Tidal Wave (2009)

** (out of 4)

This South Korean disaster picture deals with a wide range of people who at first are trying to deal with their personal lives but this all changes when a tsunami hits and they must fight for their lives. Apparently this film had the biggest budget for anything to come from South Korean and in fact I thought the special effects of the disaster looked pretty good but more on that in a bit. What really kills TIDAL WAVE is the first eighty-minutes, which is the time spent with the characters. It's clear that this film is just like so many American films in that we spend the majority of the running time getting to know the characters so that when the disaster does hit we care for them and want to see them survive. The problem here is that the majority of this is built around a bunch of comedy bits that simply aren't funny and in fact they really take you out of the movie. I'm really not sure what the purpose of these comedy scenes were but they should have been in a Laurel and Hardy movie and not something like this. Even the personal drama was pretty predictable as we are given the same stereotypes and same clichés that every disaster movie has followed since the 1970s. The film certainly does come alive once the tsunami hits and I thought the special effects were extremely good on the whole. Yes, there are some shots that are obviously fake but I enjoyed the imagination that went into them and we do get some pretty intense scenes. Still, after these scenes we fall back into the cliché routine with way too many scenes where someone is giving their live for someone else's and it just gets a bit repetitive after a while. TIDAL WAVE, on the whole, is a disappointment but fans of the genre will still want to check out the actual disaster bit.

This lacklustre disaster flick should have been so good: it features tremendously good special effects scenes of 100-metre high waves tearing through a city, laying waste to anything and everything in their path. These scenes alone are among some of the best bits I've ever watched in the whole disaster genre; destruction and mayhem on a massive scale, with carefully-crafted CGI bringing the chaos to full and authentic life.

It's a shame, then, that the surrounding movie is so poor. Tidal Wave takes an hour to get to the disaster stuff, and until that time we're treated to…Korean comedy. Now, I don't mind a bit of comedy, the quirkier the better; THE HOST had a lot of fun moments. But this comedy is something else, the comedy of ridiculous characters behaving ridiculously, almost on a sub-slapstick standard. The over-the-top acting is absolutely appalling; I avoid American comedies on principle but this is even worse than those.

Of course, disaster movies always have to build up to the disaster, and I fully understand the need to develop the characters before dropping them in the clag. But, in my mind, the film should always be about the disaster, even before it occurs: have characters making warnings that are unheeded, or build suspense and foreboding with minor events preceding it. DANTE'S PEAK is a case in point of how to achieve this. TIDAL WAVE sits in a completely different, and entirely superfluous, genre until the actual disaster occurs.

Once the chaos gets underway, things get a lot better, although there's a reliance on overwrought melodrama which will test the patience of even the most hardened viewer, I imagine. Endless scenes of characters facing death, drawn out in painful slow-motion and with maximum crying, screaming, sobbing and telling each other they love them. Such scenes are a personal pet hate of mine, and they threaten to overwhelm the film even when the going gets good. It's a real shame, as with access to those special effects TIDAL WAVE could have, and should have, been a true great.